


Trifecta

by Nemonus



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Epitaph, Female-Centric, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-04
Updated: 2012-10-04
Packaged: 2017-11-15 14:38:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>CT’s dog tags have been passed through a lot of hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trifecta

CT’s dog tags have been passed through a lot of hands.  
  
Connie herself, fidgeting, frightened to the tips of her fingers but somehow not quite feeling it in her core as she opens Tex’s locker, the empty one, and nearly throws them inside. Conflicting feelings for both herself and the team wrap up inside her like the silver chain. Tex has no pictures taped to her locker door, no pets or pinups or reminders. The layer of dust on the shelf leaves tire track marks in the wake of the chain. Now CT knows that she never had reason to use the locker: Tex doesn’t have a suit to change out of really: she is one solid body, a literal interpretation of the symbiotic relationship a soldier is supposed to have with their suit. Suit, AI, and mind are all she is: no skin.  
  
CT leaves her a piece of metal that is not a part of her and hopes that is enough.  
  
When Tex finds the tags, her hands barely dislodge the dust. She scoops them out of the locker with all the passion and attention of someone cleaning dust from under a couch: she’s just getting rid of something that she doesn’t want there. When she sees the dead woman’s name she pays enough attention to become one of only two people to find the tiny slot at the edge of one of the metal pieces.  
  
(Leonard Church must have recognized some kind of kindred scientific mind in her.)  
  
Texas does not think about the fact that she killed CT. Omega was screaming in her head in that small, dark room, and CT’s body was just a target, one out of two out of three that she was allowed to kill. When she sees the face and thin shoulders on the screen, she wonders whether there wasn’t more to know about the quiet Freelancer, but it is a quiet query, not an active regret.  
  
Many years later, Wash finds the tags hitched up against the wall of a Pelican. He does not know whether Tex threw them there or had them taken from her, whether it was a precaution or a mistake, but the name is obscured with dirt and he almost shies away from the thought of this dirty silver lying against someone’s skin.  
  
Then Carolina shoos him away, and he digs his fingers into the dirt, and he sees a name he has not thought about in a long time. Not since his thoughts reconfigured. CT, to Wash, is a mix of _Mother of Inventio_ n camaraderie and Recovery pain.  
  
He hands the tags over to Carolina without a word and she takes them without looking, hiding what she thinks is evidence of Texas in a pack at her belt.  
  
Wash realizes now that he should have never thought the tags belong to Tex. The team who Recovered her body would never have let evidence like that lay around.  
  
CT, though,  didn’t matter to the Recovery teams any more.  
  
(Not to most of them, and he, well, he had thought she was dead in the desert, and her memory is still sun-scorched sand to him, comforting and burning all at once.)  
  
But Carolina commits the same sin the Director does - everything is Texas, all maps and contours of her all she can see, and so Carolina pockets her jealousy without reading a word.  
  
Carolina’s hands, much smaller than Tex’s, are used to handling only her own dog tags when, nervous and needing to be reassured of her own existence and the things that bind her, she runs her fingers under the chain around her neck. She feels sorry for CT but it is in an old, distant way, with a sense of gladness that CT got away before an AI got her. Only after a moment does she remember CT falling and Carolina’s own useless rage at CT’s unnecessary death, and Carolina notes that that is a vitriolic emotion hidden away but still raw, one that had remained covered over even when she saw the brown helmet in the desert.  
  
She hands the tags to Church, as much as you can hand anything to a ghost: she dangles them in front of him, and reaching out his transparent non-hands he becomes the second person to notice the tiny crack CT made in the metal. Carolina notes that the one who never knew her, except perhaps in a distant way as the Alpha who oversaw their missions, will be the one to unlock her secret.  
  
“If I don’t come out in like three months,” he starts, and she realizes that he’s willing to do this again: he’s willing to go back into something like that Epsilon unit that she wrested him from and search for Tex again, or for answers again.  
  
Tex has everything to do with everything.  
  
Even now, she’s why they’re here.  
  
Carolina still can’t think that’s okay, not completely. Even with Epsilon telling her that Tex wanted to be her friend and CT wanted to be Tex’s friend and all of that - the competition still exists. It’s just a little farther away right now.  
  
 _If she was really the best, she would be standing here._  
  
And maybe, with the memories of Texas and CT gaining new places in her mind, she can feel it start to fade.   
  
 _Connie_ , Carolina thinks, _should be standing here._  
  
When Epsilon comes out (no three months, no grand adventure, just memories that haunt him, and Carolina knows all about that) she folds her fingers around the dog tags again. She thinks that the dirt of Tex’s adventures and the fruit of CT’s labor should stay with someone who understood them, but that’s nearly impossible.  
  
Maybe they’ll pass through other hands.  
  
For now, she puts them away, not with the unseeing sense of disdain she felt when she thought they belonged to Tex, but with a sense of contentment, and that she will have to find CT a proper grave, and work to ensure that too many others don’t line up beside her.


End file.
